Jeffrey D. Sadow is an associate professor of political science at Louisiana State University Shreveport. If you're an elected official, political operative or anyone else upset at his views, don't go bothering LSUS or LSU System officials about that because these are his own views solely.
This publishes Sunday through Thursday with the exception of 7 holidays. Also check out his Louisiana Legislature Log especially during legislative sessions (in "Louisiana Politics Blog Roll" below).

Search This Blog

3.12.13

Elite instransigence cause of possible EBR breakaway

Has it come to this: people
exercising their constitutional rights, whose policy preferences are given
second-class status because they are less numerous than those in the wagon that
they pull, are selfish for doing so?

That’s an apt description of the
reactions from opponents of the drive for south East Baton Rouge Parish
to incorporate itself into its own separate municipality, proposed to be named
St. George, removing itself from a metropolitan government that would have only
the northern and central parts of the parish that are not the municipalities of
Baker, Central, and Zachary and the city of Baton Rouge remaining. This
presently southern unincorporated area of the parish would create a city of
around 107,000 people and become almost as large in land area as Baton Rouge
itself.

The process is simple: collect
signatures on a petition without time limit representing a quarter of the
registered voters in the area, which then triggers an election where a majority
of those voters can approve of the new municipality. The politics behind it, by
contrast, are complex.

A couple
of years ago concerned families in the area pressured the Legislature to
create an independent school district in a large part of the area, voicing a
frustration that the East Baton Rouge Parish School System pursued policies
that put vested interests among politicians, administrators, and unions ahead
of children’s education. That paid off this past year in the creation of such a
majority-black district that while would not have been ranked a high performer
compared to others statewide it would have been scored higher than the
consistently lagging EBRPSS, except that no means of financing was provided.
Legislators signaled they did not feel comfortable carving a district out of an
existing district without some municipality to anchor it.

So, backers of the breakaway
district went about creating that municipality, which if then the district were
altered to conform to that would make it even better performing than in its
present version at the expense of the EBRPSS. This tossed opponents from the
frying pan into the fire, for now the proposition was about more authority over
more people and they could no longer control the process, as now it didn’t
matter that they had the backing of almost all elected officials in East Baton
Rouge outside of the district for the policymaking locus has shifted from their
having the majority of power to that now being in the hands of the people of
the district.

Naturally, in response they have
set about on a campaign of misrepresentation and scare-mongering. It started
with Mayor-President Kip
Holdeninsinuating
the enterprise was racist, but now has become less bigoted and more sophisticated
in the attempt to discourage success of the petitioning process. It continued
in the alarmist mode when a paid shill for city-parish interests imagined
the new municipality would remove $90 million from EBR coffers, but took a more
reasonable tack in embracing the view from local academicians that this figure
was $53
million, or a fifth of the current EBR budget, based upon the idea that a
quarter of the residents in areas covered by the city-parish government would
separate but take 40 percent of the sales tax revenue with them.

Some opponents, perhaps lacking
confidence they can defeat the petition/election process, have approached going
berserk over the possibility of breakaway. EBR Metro Council member Denise Marcelle,
playing the role of Pharaoh, threatens extralegal annexation of the area by
fiat to stop it, laying bare for observers the real reason why it has come to
this: it’s all about money and power, to the point where elites feel they have
the right to impose their will on their employers to enjoy both. The strategy
of talking about how the move in and of itself would make the whole suffer, with
the undercurrent that the selfish few would act so to harm the many, is to
distract from the fact that the portion that wants out of the current
arrangement does because of poor policy choices made by majorities of existing
political elites of which they disproportionately bear this burden.

While it mainly rests with dissatisfaction
of the poor-performing EBRPSS, that the area with both the state’s major
university and its capital does so poorly
relative to the rest of the country in terms of income testifies to the
fact that this local government has created policy insufficient to rectify this
shortcoming. Part of this underperformance does get weighed down by the
inadequacies of the school system – it’s more difficult to spur economic
development when the product coming out of the schools is substandard – but city-parish
politicians can both pressure schools to place a higher primacy on children’s
learning and less on satisfying special interests and come up with policy more
towards growth and efficient government less enamored with redistribution and
attention to special interests. Already, St. George organizers have done precisely
this with a governance plan long
on efficiency through contracting.

In other words, it is not that
portion of the citizenry that wants this policy change that is the enemy that
elites try to demonize as not having its mind right with total commitment for
EBR, but that enemy is themselves, because of the poor policy choices that they
have made (such as employee benefits even more generous than the gravy train offered by the state). The easiest solution is for them to put ego and interests aside and
change their policies, for those and the intransigence in holding onto them are
the actual cause of the schism. Trying to delegitimize dissenters who have real
grievances and who are following constitutional means by which to redress them
isn’t just a dereliction of duty, it’s politics at the rankest and lowest
level.

And this approach
does nothing to address the disease affecting both schools and city-parish
government that they disavow to have nurtured, the officials of the latter of
which would do well to emulate ideas expressed in the St. George governance plan.
When leaders appear unserious in that task of restoration and rejuvenation, it
is not selfish to want to exit that scene, but instead draws upon the very foundational
aspects of American government.

About Me

Subscribe To

Comment publishing requirements

You must be a registered user with an OpenID-compliant service to leave comments, which will be moderated. Any comments that do not address issues in the post for which they are intended will not be posted; neither will those that utterly lack intellectual coherence.